Drawing upon decades of experience, RAND provides research services, systematic analysis, and innovative thinking to a global clientele that includes government agencies, foundations, and private-sector firms.

The Pardee RAND Graduate School (PRGS.edu) is the largest public policy Ph.D. program in the nation and the only program based at an independent public policy research organization—the RAND Corporation.

Purchase Print Copy

This article was originally written in 1976 as a classified RAND Corporation contribution to a major study involving several governmental and private research organizations that was commissioned by then-Secretary of Defense James R. Schlesinger to develop a comprehensive classified history of the Soviet-American strategic arms competition from 1945 to 1972. The intent of the original document was to outline the key internal and external factors that shaped the early strategic policy choices of the Brezhnev regime, address the broad strategic objectives that informed and energized it, consider the characteristics and deployment rationales of the third-generation ICBM programs that most visibly dominated it, and highlight the principal features of the force development style that it seemed to represent. The document was declassified in 2006 by the Department of Defense and approved for public release in response to a request submitted to the Department under the Freedom of Information Act. It was subsequently published in essentially unaltered form from the original in order to place the now-declassified document into the public domain and, in so doing, to offer a fact-based retrospective account of an important chapter in the history of the cold war.

Research conducted by

This report is part of the RAND Corporation reprint series. The Reprint was a product of the RAND Corporation from 1992 to 2011 that represented previously published journal articles, book chapters, and reports with the permission of the publisher. RAND reprints were formally reviewed in accordance with the publisher's editorial policy and compliant with RAND's rigorous quality assurance standards for quality and objectivity. For select current RAND journal articles, see External Publications.

The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.

The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit, nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.